Google wants to predict the next sentences of dead authors

Getty Images Google is teaching its artificial intelligence how to understand language by making it predict, and replicate, the works of famous dead authors. The company is building systems that are capable of understanding natural language in the same way humans do, with the works of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain and others currently being analysed. “This work has the potential to enrich products through personalisation,” Marc Pickett from Google’s Natural Language Understanding research group wrote in a recent blog post. Researchers training the deep neural network — using the work of authors from Project Gutenberg — fed the AI an input sentence and asked it to say what would come next. The network is given millions of lines from a “jumble” of authors and then works out the style of…